Larry Ellison Hearsay: "We Can't Be Successful if We Don't Lie to Customers"

Long before Mark Pincus talked about making revenue any way he could, there was Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Brash, funny, ladies-man-playboy and intensely competitive, they don’t make tech entrepreneurs like Ellison anymore. Bloomberg’s Game Changers series is taking on Ellison in a special airing tomorrow at 6 pm pacific time on Bloomberg TV. It sounds like it’ll be a juicy send up of my favorite eyebrow-less mogul, and I’m setting my TiVo now.

They wouldn’t send me a transcript before it airs, but I did get a few teasers out of them. Here are some quotes from the show by some of the people who worked the closest with Ellison:

Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember him very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.”

Stuart Feigin, Oracle’s fifth employee says, “There was no version 1 [of Oracle software] because everyone thought, well, no one buys version 1, it’s buggy. So we started with a version 2. Well, our version two was at least as buggy as anyone’s version 1…And I describe those early versions as the roach motel of databases. The data went in, but it didn’t come out.”

Gary Bloom, one of Ellison’s many heir apparents that didn’t quite work out, says, “I have a theory that Larry’s succession plan for Oracle is he is trying to figure out a way that when he’s six feet under in a grave, he can still run Oracle.”

Sadly, it doesn’t look like Ellison himself was interviewed, which isn’t surprising given how media-shy he’s been for much of the last decade. Your chair is always waiting at TechCrunchTV, Larry.